Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 2, Episode 19

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 2 • Episode 19

Share episode

Ever wondered how contrasting training methods shape athletes? Join us on Two Coaches and a Coffee as we unpack the secrets behind strength training approaches in sports with exclusive insights from Dave Tenney. In this episode, we compare the unstructured, resilience-building play styles of South American footballers with the precision-focused, structured training models in Australia. Hear firsthand experiences from the MLS and discover how balancing these two methods can create well-rounded, injury-resistant athletes. 

Uncover the journeys of rising stars like Harley Reid, whose physical prowess at 18 sets him apart, and Matt DeBoer, who transformed from a mediocre athlete to a top performer through hard work and tailored training. We dive into the importance of individualized training plans and how understanding an athlete's background is crucial for effective coaching. From college football to the NFL, we share professional insights and strategies to maximize each athlete's potential. Tune in to explore the cultural adaptations required in coaching and the nuanced blend of skill and physicality needed across different sports.

SpeedSig Intro

Sponsored by SPEEDSIG.com

Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee, Drs Burgess and Weber here. Burjo, I'll just make some acknowledgments, for the moment he's chomping away on his lunch. So this is, as we just said. This is very real. This is right in the middle of Burjo's commitments with the Adelaide Crows. I myself am packing bags and getting ready to jump on a plane. So, Burjo, how are you doing there, mate, you hanging in there?

Darren Burgess:

Going okay. Yep, just coming out of team selection and yeah, got another meeting shortly and then pick the kids up from school. So fun times here, mate Good stuff, but keen to get cracking. He had a very good conversation with Dave Tenney, one of the great practitioners, and of a similar. He won't be offended if I say a similar vintage to us Yep.

Darren Burgess:

And he picked us up on something where we yeah, exactly we said we were going to get to something in the next episode and Yep, similar experience, team sports players and the views or the alternate methods to do that, one of which is often when you find South American players and he's working in the MLS with Austin at the moment and gets a lot of South American players in who have grown up with different size balls, different new numbers in games 2v2, 3v3, depending on how many people there are about different surfaces, different footwear and just play versus. Let's call it the I don't know. We'll call it the Australian model, so as not to offend any of our European or American counterparts.

Darren Burgess:

Or contemporary model. Contemporary model where you do some running, you do a bit of the sport, you do some drills, you do some cone drills, you do some technique running, you do some gym work, you do a bit of Pilates, maybe a bit of yoga. You play once a week, Play once a week, but do a lot of stuff around the edges, which is designed to, I guess, make you more resilient and resistant to injury. And the two ways of looking at it go.

Jason Weber:

Mate, I think we've touched on this. But Dave's in a really unique position where he does have a lot of that South American influence. I saw that in my short tenure in the A-League, having worked with some Spanish guys who'd played La Liga and the like. Yeah, it's all I've ever done. I've always played Personally.

Jason Weber:

I don't think you can say one is better than the other, but I will say I will use a word that I've used quite extensively in this area and that is attritional. I think the systems that develop those players like the favela, the kids who play every day and they work their way up and that's all they ever do. It's attritional Because there's a kid that gets injured when he's 12. He rolls his ankle, he can't keep up, blah, blah, blah. You don't hear about him, he's out the door. But because there's so many playing, they push the numbers through. Now it's not dissimilar, a little bit of an overlap, but the rugby league model in Australia is very much based on being just hard. Right, there's not, they're not, and they have certainly improved in the, I guess, the sports sciences. But traditionally the model is smash the kids through juniors and the ones that come through at the top are absolutely unbreakable and my example would be so.

Jason Weber:

In my earlier, the earlier part of my tenure in rugby around 2003, 2004, we had three rugby league players come into the wallabies and I would agree and I would attest that they were broadly indestructible. They didn't get injured, they just kept going. They did their thing. Yeah, they lifted, but they ran hard, they ran a lot and I would attest that they were broadly indestructible. They didn't get injured, they just kept going. They did their thing. Yeah, they lifted, but they ran hard. They ran a lot harder than a lot of rugby guys. And it's interesting, eddie Jones comes out this week and says NRL players are much tougher than union players.

Darren Burgess:

Interesting sideline.

Jason Weber:

But I think there is something to that. I've had to fight all the way to get through, as compared to what happens in AFL, maybe a little bit which is you get the elite come through. So we've got a kid playing. Harley Reid plays West Coast. He was our first draft pick this year. Awesome kid, all the rest of it. But there are kids just below that who have been picked four, five, 10, and they're going to be average and they may never do any good, but they've been told all their life how good they are, yet they haven't actually had to fight for it. So I'm not advocating one versus the other, but I think one of the things we talked about remember you brought up that athlete in the UK who had voiced his opinion that he didn't want to do strength training. Yeah, I think the point of that is we have to acknowledge there's different ways. Anyway, what do you think, mate?

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, there's certainly different ways, but what is really important and even I was speaking to an AFLW athlete, one of the Crows' best players today, not more than I don't know three hours ago, because match committee went for about that long and she was saying I'm really regimented and I'm really structured and I'm really and sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes that's a bad thing because I don't quite get the variety of stimulus that I need and I thought that's a really mature way to look at it, because I think that's the key in this use your term and call it more contemporary is we say you're having gym at 2pm and you're doing lowers today and uppers the next day, and then we're doing breakdown drills on Monday.

Darren Burgess:

We're doing this, and so there is a certain amount of variety, but there is nowhere near the scenario-based strength as well as gameplay as what you would get from just playing, and that's whether it's league union, particularly football, basketball. Just playing means you're exposed to so many different scenarios where, unless you display or adapt strength or moves, you won't survive and you won't progress. So I think contemporary is good as long as there's variety. Obviously we'll call it the South American, which is a little bit.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, it's the attritional model.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, yeah, the attritional model, yeah, that has certainly got the variety, but it might lack at times the overload that you might need. It might, but I think to dismiss one and say this young South American player has come into my system and has got no gym exposure. Oh shit, I'm going to have to take him through the lifts, or take her through the lifts and they're going to have to teach him how to Olympic. Or take her through the lifts and they're going to have to teach him how to Olympic lift and how to squat and how to you know, it's just hopefully no one's doing that, because it's just hammer, nail stuff.

Jason Weber:

I think people are doing it, mate. I think that's the point. So I mean, I do know.

Jason Weber:

When I turned up in the A-League I had one of these Spanish guys being told I have to lift the A-League. I had one of these Spanish guys being told I have to lift, I have to do this. And in fact, another player I worked with in that realm who was a wingback, so a really good running kid, fast but relatively inflexible, was told he had to squat. That's what you got to do, you've got to squat. And I met him and went there's no way you're squatting, my friend, you're not suited to it. You and I we haven't got the time to develop all the flexibility, but you can do single leg and we can do anyway, pressed on I. I think there's no question where there's horses for courses. Now, I know that gets challenging when you're in a big environment.

Jason Weber:

I was in uh in the in texas earlier in the year and watched uh, texas A&M running through strength sessions with their beginner athletes, their freshies, coming in. They just line them all up and everybody on the whistle like lift, lift, lift and that's just how they manage numbers. But it's still the same thing. Everybody do it and if you can't survive, out the door, man, I don't doubt you for a second. I think your comment about leading towards chaos variety, yeah, in some of our more or lower playing sports like teams, guys that don't play very often we have an issue. But I'll do the counter, which we have talked about before, that I've seen in in high school athletes over the last two years an immense number of lumbar stress fractures because kids are getting overdone. Now, is that because they're trying to run too much? Because they're trying to repeat speed, they can't run, they can't generate good vertical forces, so they're arching into their back. I don't know, but would they be better suited to just playing?

Darren Burgess:

So you're saying that a lot of kids coming into the US system are getting injured because you're suggesting that might?

Jason Weber:

be a reason. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'm saying I've seen in Australia in the AFL, like in the AFL system, not at the AFL level, but kids coming through Australian rules football from 16 through to about sorry 15 through to 17, getting a ton of kids with pars, interarticular stress fractures, so lumbar stress fractures from extension rotation moments because of fundamentally too much of something it's not lifting because most of the kids that I've seen don't lift. So it's got nothing to do with that, it's got to do with what they're choosing to do. Now they're doing football. Some of them are playing cricket.

Jason Weber:

Cricket's a killer, but take cricket out of it because it's obvious. Basketball, jumping sports, volleyball, football, Now the football. Then I go for a 10K run on the weekend. Now, I'm not necessarily advocating for that, but I do think, man, there's, I think there's a sweet spot between them because the attritional thing the learn how to fight. I had a great talk yesterday with your great mate, Dave Carillon, and we were talking about exactly this that when we're doing whatever, let's say we're doing some speed, work, agility that make it a race, Make it that kid one versus two, two versus three, whoever it is, so that the kids compete, they learn to fight rather than just I'll just sit in my own lane because it's not track and field. You've got to physically fight and I think that's what you see out of that attritional system, with kids who just prepared to fight and prepared to give everything for sure you know at at the uh, to win the objective of whatever that is at that time.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I think what trumps a lot of things, or what's really important to add context to in your programs, is that competitive element.

Jason Weber:

Yep.

Darren Burgess:

I think that your body will find a way to adapt more often than not in that competitive element. And I think that's, yeah, Dave, certainly growing up on the main streets of Norwich, he would have had that competitive element in his, yeah, in his training at all times, which you kind of have to, you know, with some of the teams and clubs and organisations that he's been with, like the competitive stuff. It's just brutal.

Jason Weber:

Mate, I got another little twist right. So we've got the kids that succeed, the ones that come through. Let's say, we talked about Harley Reid before brilliant athlete, awesome competitor, like the kid.

Darren Burgess:

So the overseas people? Harley Reid was number one draft pick and fulfilled that Delivered. He's delivered big time in his first year.

Jason Weber:

And he's 18 years old and he plays like a 25-year-old man, like he is physically dominant.

Jason Weber:

Now part of that's attitude. He's not a particularly big guy, but his attitude and explosive Right. So all of those things. Maybe he did some good work while he was in his development years. But what about the kids that we work with Now? I can name. I'll name one, matt DeBoer. Now, no one overseas will know him Few in Australia might not even.

Jason Weber:

But Matt got recruited at a reasonable number, not too big, but he was okay. At best he was a plotter as an athlete. But this kid worked and worked and worked and got stronger and fitter and in his first couple of years he had stress fractures in his feet. He just couldn't tolerate the volumes that we're doing. And then came the shift in Australian football when we got extra rotations and this amount of running just went through the roof. He changed. He went from a very average at the time we were doing 3Ks. He went from a very average 3K to he worked his butt off and he came back and was like a top five athlete in our squad.

Jason Weber:

So there's a rationale to what we did was a a structured plan to help this kid get better. Now does he survive in a nutritional system or does he just fall by the wayside because he tries to keep up and he can't, whereas we're able to give him very specific work and we built, we built with and we got there. So does he survive a nutritional system? Yeah, do you reckon? I don't know, I mean, the kids are fine. He was another warrior, without question, so maybe he does.

Jason Weber:

But I think there's a case, for there are those that are going to succeed, maybe sometimes in spite of us, but I think there are a lot where we get to succeed because of us, and I'm not saying that we should intervene on everything. I think the example of the English guy that you noted some weeks ago that his opinion was and he had an example and he had facts I like that. That's a very, very self-aware athlete. Now, hopefully that's the truth. But as a professional I would respect that position Same as if I mean, I do a lot of work at the moment through college football and SEC and even into NFL, and there are conversations I have there where I'm like I will say you've got a kid who's got XYZ abilities and there are some deficiencies.

Jason Weber:

Now the deficiencies, in my opinion, are of a magnitude that we really need to get them up just to an acceptable level so he can go and prevent maybe in some cases prevent injury. So I've suggested why does he go and do all the general strength that everybody else is doing? Why are we going to put 200 kilos on his back when it's going to compress his spine and it's going to add to? This kid has issues in his hamstring that come out of his back. Why don't we change that? So, rather than have him in that attritional model, take him and do something different with him and focus on his ability, whereas he doesn't fit the group, which is no different to a kid who's saying we're going to play four times a week, five times a week, we're going to play every day. Some can't do it.

Darren Burgess:

I guess the determining factor in all of this is Breeding.

Jason Weber:

Well, breeding mate, breeding. Hitler had it right. Yeah, yes, pull that one up.

Darren Burgess:

I retract that the Cubans in the 80s? I think yeah.

Jason Weber:

Long jumpers.

Darren Burgess:

The Deborah example is a good example, right? Because um by any sort of objective judge um not the most naturally talented, um skillful player. So in that circumstance, um now ifl lends itself to being able to play when you're not super skilled. Not super skilled. There are plenty of really skilled people who aren't playing afl and are playing country leagues and things like that because they didn't have the physical attributes. So there's a nice mixture of skill and physicality in football soccer I would argue it's the other way because it's you know, probably 85 percent skill.

Darren Burgess:

So if all that work in the offseason improving your physicality, um, is at the expense of, or instead of, skill play, then and that's the advantage that the attritional jason weber copyrighted attritional model has um is that it's improving your match play as well I think I think you've nailed that with that.

Jason Weber:

Let's change and then go. Basketball Does basketball represent a more skill-based sport compared to a more physical-based sport? Let's say, whereas soccer, football and AFL are quite distinct, I agree, I think AFL is far more physical. You can get by in AFL by being a great runner and all the rest of it, but you can't get away with that in soccer if you're in the real football. What do you think of basketball Does?

Darren Burgess:

that fit. Yeah, no, I think that's probably in the soccer end rather than the AFL end, but I guess it applies really well to basketball, because one of the great things about basketball like soccer and we spoke about this last week is you need that resilience, that ability to play day after day, night after night, different time zones, different weather, different levels of fatigue, and I'm not sure you can get that in the gym.

Jason Weber:

No, categorically not.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, so that attritional model really comes into play, then All right. And that we send our players to the streets to play pick-up ball at Venice Beach. You can get that within. You know the NBA setting. Of course you can, of course, but yeah, you need to be a bit more creative with it.

Jason Weber:

All right, matt, I'm going to throw you a coach intervention because this is right what we're talking about. So I've got the soccer player I mentioned earlier, the wingback young man who's just gone through cancer treatment. So he's come out the other end, thankfully. He's done well, but we've been training all the way through chemo and everything and building it up. But now he's starting to build back to hopefully getting an A-League gig later this year.

Jason Weber:

Now we're deliberately training double days and back-to-back days simply to prepare for the fact that that's what football coaches do. Football coaches will pull double days of soccer, whereas that doesn't happen so much in the AFL anymore. It's certainly rugby union, that type of sphere sphere where I come from. You might run one, but you do line outs or something later. But we're now prepping so he doesn't have a space, he doesn't have a favela to go to and play. But we're trying to recreate that by saying, yeah, you're going to run in the morning, you're going to go home, have a spell, you're going to come back and we're going to do another section later in the afternoon just to prep him for football. So I think maybe the point in all this, mate, is really people in the industry having a really good look at what they're doing.

Jason Weber:

And what's your sport? What's the heritage of the sport? Where are your kids coming from? Like what are they? And this is something I'll always argue is what's the heritage of the sport? Where are your kids coming from? Like, what are they and what? This is something I'll always argue is what's their trick? What got them to this point? What did they do if they were standing on their head an hour every day? Because that's what they think it worked? I think we should help them stand on their head. I mean, I know that's extreme, but you've got to respect what they've done.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, yeah, it's really important to understand cultural, obviously, when you're in international sports, but also historical sense, and not walk into an organisation or not have people walk into your organisation and you dictate what they do because you know best and that's what has worked at a previous organisation or with a previous midfielder or with a previous power forward or whatever your sport might be, and I think sometimes it does take experience to figure that out. But yeah, it's a really important point.

Jason Weber:

Well, I think you've made a great point. Experience In my wonderful chat with the great man Dave Carroll on yesterday, which is always an entertainment.

Darren Burgess:

You've given him way too much publicity, Dave.

Jason Weber:

He gives us nothing on his podcast? Why?

Darren Burgess:

are we continually pumping him up, Mate?

Jason Weber:

I don't know, I just enjoyed the chat. Like I live my life on video chat so it's really cool when I get to have one. So anyway. But we were talking about the fact that he's seeing a trend in the UK of a lot of younger guys getting performance leadership roles. So I would counsel you got to listen to what Darren just said Takes experience, but it takes a second to stand back and not go hey, we're doing it my way. Let's look at what we've got. Let's see how did it? Like? I'm part of their journey. I talk to them and this is one of the things I learned in soccer which I was so thankful for.

Jason Weber:

You get guys who went to a club. If you're from Australia, they go to an Italian club when they're 17, 18, even younger, 16, and they learn stuff. And then they learn stuff somewhere and then they join you and then they're going to go somewhere else. So you're only part of their journey and so you're trying to add a nice paragraph or a sentence or maybe a chapter to what they're doing, but you don't own them. And I think sometimes we get young S&C coaches who feel like they own it. In America they're very big, I did this. I coaches who feel like they own it In.

Jason Weber:

America. They're very big. I did this.

Darren Burgess:

I got this player drafted, yeah, yeah, you know like they're putting on your resume, so you were the reason.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, putting them on your resume.

Darren Burgess:

I got 24 guys drafted, please, so I think there's a section there for the young guys going in Humility, look, listen, learn. And that's not to dismiss being a bit flippant there, not to dismiss what some people uh do in in those scenarios because they really can, um, you know, make a percent or two difference, um, absolutely um, and and in that industry you probably do have to self-promote a little bit more in than in other injury injuries, other industries. But yeah, I think, as you said, that humility and where we fit in the whole spectrum is probably an important lesson to learn.

Jason Weber:

When I say learn, I don't mean I mean you've got to learn from the guys who are senior to you. You've got to learn off knuckleheads who've been around, but learn off your athletes. Learn what's in front of you, watch it, watch how they move to you. You got to learn off knuckleheads who've been around, but learn off your athletes.

Jason Weber:

Learn what's in front of you, watch it, look, watch how they move. You know, someone said to me ages ago how do you get started in all this? I said train anybody, train old people, young people, like anybody, like I started as a personal trainer. Right, watch how people move, listen, learn and you will. You'll adapt. So yeah, learn from your environment, no question on that philosophical note.

Jason Weber:

Uh, we'll make it short and sweet, because I do have to, uh, get back to my proper job yeah one day we might next, maybe next time out we might discuss match committee and the frivolous nature with which AFL conducts selection for hours and hours.

Darren Burgess:

You can say that I can't say that because I'm gaming. I can say that my kids' education relies on me being here, but I'm happy to chat about it. Let's do that next week.

Jason Weber:

Or at least nod your head.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, when you're in 42 degrees next week in the desert, yeah yeah, in the desert, all right.

Jason Weber:

Well, best to everyone Listen. Last week we had a little call out. We asked if you were listening to our podcast to just get one person else to do. It Looked like it worked. We got a few more last week, so we're going to ask again If you're listening to our podcast and you like it, share it with somebody, share it with one of your buddies and let's get this thing up in some numbers. Thank you all very much, and you guys have a great week and we'll speak to you soon. Bye.